The World Wide Web

Outline Background Structure Protocols

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WWW Background
1989-1990 Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web at CERN
Means for transferring text and graphics simultaneously Client/Server data transfer protocol
Communication via application level protocol System ran on top of standard networking infrastructure

Text mark up language

Not invented by Bernes-Lee Simple and easy to use Requires a client application to render text/graphics
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WWW History contd.

1994 Mark Andreesen invents MOSAIC at National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA)
First graphical browser Internets first killer app Freely distributed Became Netscape Inc. Exponential growth E-commerce Web infrastructure companies World Wide Web Consortium

1995 (approx.) Web traffic becomes dominant

Reference: Web Protocols and Practice, Krishnamurthy and Rexford

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WWW Components
Structural Components
Clients/browsers to dominant implementations Servers run on sophisticated hardware Caches many interesting implementations Internet the global infrastructure which facilitates data transfer

Semantic Components
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)
eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)

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Quick Aside Web server use

Source: Netcraft Server Survey, 2001

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WWW Structure
Clients use browser application to send URIs via HTTP to servers requesting a Web page Web pages constructed using HTML (or other markup language) and consist of text, graphics, sounds plus embedded files Servers (or caches) respond with requested Web page
Or with error message

Clients browser renders Web page returned by server

Page is written using Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) Displaying text, graphics and sound in browser Writing data as well

The entire system runs over standard networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS,)
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Uniform Resource Identifiers

Web resources need names/identifiers Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)
Resource can reside anywhere on the Internet

URIs are a somewhat abstract notion

A pointer to a resource to which request methods can be applied to generate potentially different responses
A request method is eg. fetching or changing the object

Instance: http://www.foo.com/index.html
Protocol, server, resource

Most popular form of a URI is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

Differences between URI and URL are beyond scope RFC 2396
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HTTP Basics
Protocol for client/server communication
The heart of the Web Very simple request/response protocol
Client sends request message, server replies with response message

Stateless Relies on URI naming mechanism

Three versions have been used

09/1.0 very close to Berners-Lees original
RFC 1945 (original RFC is now expired)

1.1 developed to enhance performance, caching, compression

RFC 2068

1.0 dominates today but 1.1 is catching up

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HTTP Request Messages

GET retrieve document specified by URL PUT store specified document under given URL HEAD retrieve info. about document specified by URL OPTIONS retrieve information about available options POST give information (eg. annotation) to the server DELETE remove document specified by URL TRACE loopback request message CONNECT for use by caches
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HTTP Request Format

request-line ( request request-URI HTTP-version) headers (0 or more) <blank line> body (only for POST request)

First type of HTTP message: requests

Client browsers construct and send message

Typical HTTP request:

GET http://www.cs.wisc.edu/index.html HTTP/1.0

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HTTP Response Format

status-line (HTTP-version response-code response-phrase) headers (0 or more) <blank line> body

Second type of HTTP message: response

Web servers construct and send response messages

Typical HTTP response:

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://www.wisc.edu/cs/index.html
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HTTP Response Codes

1xx Informational request received, processing 2xx Success action received, understood, accepted 3xx Redirection further action necessary 4xx Client Error bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled 5xx Server Error server failed

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HTTP Headers
Both requests and responses can contain a variable number of header fields
Consists of field name, colon, space, field value 17 possible header types divided into three categories
Request Response Body

Example: Date: Friday, 27-Apr-01 13:30:01 GMT Example: Content-length: 3001

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HTTP/1.0 Network Interaction

Clients make requests to port 80 on servers
Uses DNS to resolve server name

Clients make separate TCP connection for each URL

Some browsers open multiple TCP connections
Netscape default = 4

Server returns HTML page

Many types of servers with a variety of implementations Apache is the most widely used
Freely available in source form

Client parses page

Requests embedded objects
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HTTP/1.1 Performance Enhancements

HTTP/1.0 is a stop and wait protocol
Separate TCP connection for each file
Connect setup and tear down is incurred for each file Inefficient use of packets Server must maintain many connections in TIME_WAIT

Mogul and Padmanabahn studied these issues in 95

Resulted in HTTP/1.1 specification focused on performance enhancements
Persistent connections Pipelining Enhanced caching options Support for compression
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Persistent Connections and Pipelining

Persistent connections
Use the same TCP connection(s) for transfer of multiple files Reduces packet traffic significantly May or may not increase performance from client perspective
Load on server increases

Pipelining
Pack as much data into a packet as possible Requires length field(s) within header May or may not reduce packet traffic or increase performance
Page structure is critical
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HTML Basics
Hyper-Text Markup Language
A subset of Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) Facilitates a hyper-media environment
Embedded links to other documents and applications

Documents use elements to mark up or identify sections of text for different purposes or display characteristics Mark up elements are not seen by the user when page is displayed Documents are rendered by browsers NOTE: Not all documents in the Web are HTML! Most people use WYSIWYG editors (MS Word) to generate HTML
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HTML Example
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> PBs HomePage </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <CENTER><IMG SRC = bad_picture.gif ALT = ><BR></CENTER> <P><CENTER><H1>UW Computer Science Department</H1></CENTER> Welcome to my goofy HomePage! <A HREF = http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~pb/mydogs_page.html> Spots Page </A> </BODY> </HTML>

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